She hears the ancient hush of falling snow.
“No,” Otane tells her cat. “All we can do is ask Our Lady to protect her.”
THE WOODEN BOX niche set into the mud-and-bamboo wall resembles an ordinary cottage altar alcove, housing the death-name tablets of Otane’s parents and a chipped vase holding a few green sprigs. After checking the bolt on the door twice, however, Otane removes the vase and slides up the back panel. In this small and secret space stands the true treasure of Otane’s cottage and bloodline: a white-glazed, blue-veiled, dirt-cracked statuette of Maria-sama, the mother of Iesu-sama and empress of heaven, crafted long ago to resemble Kannon, the goddess of mercy. She holds an infant in her arms. Otane’s grandfather’s grandfather, the story goes, received her from a holy saint named Xavier, who sailed to Japan from paradise on a magical flying boat pulled by golden swans.
Otane kneels on painful knees with an acorn rosary around her hands.
“‘Holy Maria-sama, mother of Adan and Ewa, who stole Deusu-dono’s sacred persimmon; Maria-sama, mother of Pappa Maruji, with his six sons in six canoes, who survived the great flood that cleansed all lands; Maria, mother of Iesu-sama, who was crucified for four hundred silver coins; Maria-sama, hear my—’”
Was that a twig snapping under a man’s foot? Otane holds her breath.
Most of Kurozane’s oldest ten or twelve families are, like Otane’s, Hidden Christians, but vigilance must be constant. Her silver hair would grant her no clemency if her beliefs were ever exposed; only apostasy and the naming of other followers might transmute death into exile, but then San Peitoro and San Pauro would turn her away from the gates of paradise, and when seawater turns to oil and the world burns, she would fall into that hell called Benbô.
The herbalist is confident that nobody is outside. “Virgin Mother, it’s Otane of Kurozane. Once again, this old woman begs Her Ladyship to watch over Miss Aibagawa in the Shiranui Shrine, and keep her safe from illness, and ward off bad spirits and … and dangerous men. Please give back what has been taken from her.”
Not one rumor, Otane thinks, ever told of a young nun being set free.
“But if this old woman is asking too much of Maria-sama ….”
The stiffness in Otane’s knees is spreading to her hips and ankles.
“… please tell Miss Aibagawa that her friend, Otane of Kurozane, is thinking—”
Something strikes the door. Otane gasps. The dog is on his feet, growling …
Otane slides down the wooden screen as a second blow strikes.
The dog is barking now. She hears a man’s voice. She arranges the alcove.
At the third knock, she walks to the door and calls out, “There is nothing to steal here.”
“Is this,” a frail man’s voice replies, “the house of Otane the herbalist?”
“May I ask my honorable visitor to name himself, at this late hour?”
“Jiritsu of Shiranui,” says the visitor, “is how I was called …”
Otane is surprised to recognize the name of Master Suzaku’s acolyte.
Might Maria-sama, she wonders, have a hand in this?
“We meet at the shrine’s gatehouse,” says the voice, “twice a year.”
She opens the door to a snow-covered figure wrapped in thick mountain clothing and a bamboo hat. He stumbles over her threshold, and snow swirls in. “Sit by the fire, Acolyte.” Otane pushes the door shut. “It’s a bad night.” She guides him to a log stool.
With effort, he unfastens his hat, hood, and mountain boot bindings.
He is exhausted, his face is taut, and his eyes are not of this world.
Questions can come later, Otane thinks. First, he must be warmed up.
She pours some tea and closes his frozen fingers around the bowl.
She unclasps the monk’s damp robe and wraps her woolen shawl around him.
His throat muscles make a grinding noise as he drinks.
Perhaps he was gathering plants, Otane wonders, or meditating in a cave.
She sets about heating the remains of the soup. They do not speak.
“I FLED MOUNT SHIRANUI,” announces Jiritsu, coming abruptly to. “I broke my oath.”
Otane is astonished, but a wrong word now might silence him.
“My hand, this hand, my brush: they knew, before I did.”
She grinds some yogi root, waiting for words that make sense.
“I accepted the—the deathless way, but its truer name is ‘evil.’”
The fire snaps, the animals breathe, the snow is falling.
Jiritsu coughs, as if winded. “She sees so far! So very, very far … My father was a tobacco hawker, and gambler, around Sakai. We were just a rung above the outcasts … and one night the cards went badly and he sold me to a tanner. An untouchable. I lost my name and slept over the slaughterhouse. For years, for years, I slit horses’ throats to earn my board. Slit … slit … slit. What the tanners’ sons did to me, I … I … I … longed for someone to slit my throat. Come winter, boiling bones into glue was the only warmth. Come summer, the flies got into your eyes, your mouth, and we scraped up the dried blood and oily shit to mix it with Ezo seaweed, for fertilizer. Hell shall smell of that place …”
The roof timbers of the cottage creak. Snow is piling up.
“One New Year’s Day I climbed over the wall closing the eta village and ran away to Osaka, but the tanner sent two men to fetch me back. They underestimated my skill with knives. No man saw, but she saw. She drew me … day by rumor by crossroads by dream by month by hook, she urged me west, west, west … across the straits to Hizen Domain, to Kyôga Domain … and up …” Jiritsu looks at the ceiling, perhaps toward the summit of the mountain.
“Does Acolyte-sama,” Otane asks, grinding her pestle, “refer to someone at the shrine?”
Jiritsu stares through her. “They are all as a saw is to a carpenter.”
“This foolish old crone doesn’t understand who ‘she’ may be.”
Tears sprout in Jiritsu’s eyes. “Are we no more than the totality of our acts?”
Otane decides to be direct. “Acolyte-sama: in the shrine on Mount Shiranui, did you see Miss Aibagawa?”
He blinks and sees more clearly. “The newest sister. Yes.”
“Is she …” Now Otane wonders what to ask. “Is she well?”
He makes a deep sad purr. “The horses knew I was going to kill them.”
“How is Miss Aibagawa”—Otane’s mortar and pestle fall still—“treated?”
“If she hears,” Jiritsu says, drifting away again, “she shall poke his finger through my heart …. Tomorrow, I shall … speak of … of that place—but her hearing is sharper at night. Then I am bound for Nagasaki. I … I … I … I …”
Ginger for his circulation. Otane goes to her cabinet. Feverfew for delirium.
“My hand, my brush: they knew before I did.” Jiritsu’s wan voice follows her. “Three nights ago, but it may be three ages, I was in the scriptorium, at work at a letter from a gift. The letters are a lesser wrong, ‘acts of compassion,’ Genmu says … but … but I left myself, and upon my return, my hand, my brush, had written … had written out.…” he whispers and cringes “… I had written out the Twelve Creeds. Black ink on white parchment! Merely to utter them is a profanity, except for Master Genmu and the lord abbot, but to record them, so a layman’s eyes might read … She must have been occupied elsewhere, or she would have killed me on the spot. Master Yôten passed by, inches behind me … Not moving, I read the Twelve Creeds and saw, for the first time … the slaughterhouses of Sakai are a pleasure garden in comparison.”
Otane understands little, grates ginger, and her heart feels cold.
Jiritsu slides out a dogwood scroll tube from his inner clothing. “Some few men of power in Nagasaki, Enomoto does not own. Magistrate Shiroyama may yet prove a man of conscience … and abbots of rival orders shall be eager to know the worst, and this”—he frowns at the scroll tube—“is worse than the worst.”
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“Then Acolyte-sama intends,” Otane asks, “to go to Nagasaki?”
“East.” The aged young man struggles to locate her. “Kinten shall follow.”
“To persuade Acolyte-sama,” she hopes, “to come back to the shrine?”
Jiritsu shakes his head. “The creeds are clear about those who … turn away.”
Otane glances at her unlit butsudan alcove. “Hide here.”
Acolyte Jiritsu looks through his hand at the fire. “Stumbling in the snow, I thought, Otane of Kurozane will shelter me ….”
“This old woman is glad”—rats scrat in the thatch—“glad you thought so.”
“… for one night. But if I stay here two, Kinten shall kill us both.”
He says this without drama, as one stating a simple fact.
Fire consumes wood, thinks Otane, and time consumes us.
“Father called me ‘boy,’” he says. “The tanner called me ‘dog.’ Master Genmu named his new acolyte ‘Jiritsu.’ What is my name now?”
“Do you remember,” she asks, “what your mother called you?”
“At the slaughterhouse, I’d dream of a … motherly woman who named me Mohei.”
“That was surely her.” Otane mixes tea with the powders. “Drink.”
“When Lord Enma asks my name,” the fugitive receives the cup, “for the register of hell, that’s what I shall tell him: Mohei the Apostate.”
OTANE’S DREAMS ARE of scaly wings, roaring blindness, and distant knocks. She wakes in her bed of straw and feathers stitched between sheets of hemp. Her exposed cheeks and nose are pinched by the cold. By cracks of snow-blue daylight, she sees Mohei, lying curled by the dying fire, and remembers everything. She watches him for a while, uncertain whether he is sleeping or awake. The cat emerges from the shawl and pads over to Otane, who sifts their conversation for delirium, delusion, clues, and truth. Why he ran away, she understands, is what threatens Miss Aibagawa …
It is written in that dogwood scroll. It is still in his hand.
… and perhaps, Otane thinks, he is Maria-sama’s answer to my prayers.
He could be persuaded to stay a few days until the hunters give up.
There’s room to hide in the under-roof, she thinks, if anyone comes …
She sighs out a plume of white in the cold air. The cat puffs littler clouds.
Praise Deusu in heaven, she recites soundlessly, for this new day.
Pale clouds uncoil, too, from the wet nose of the dreaming dog.
But wrapped in the warm foreign shawl, Mohei is stiller than still.
Otane realizes he is not breathing.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE HOUSE OF SISTERS, MOUNT SHIRANUI SHRINE
Sunrise on the twenty-third morning of the tenth month
THE THREE BRONZE BOOMS OF THE BELL OF THE FIRST CAUSE REVERBERATE over roofs, dislodge pigeons, chase echoes around the cloisters, sluice under the door of the newest sister’s cell, and find Orito, who keeps her eyes shut and begs, Let me imagine I am elsewhere for a moment longer. But the smells of sour tatami, greasy candles, and stale smoke deny her any illusion of release. She hears the tap, tap, tap of the women’s tobacco pipes.
During the night, fleas or lice feasted on her neck, breast, and midriff.
In Nagasaki, she thinks, just two days away, the maples will still be red …
The manju flowers pink and white, the sanma saury fat and in season.
A two-day journey, she thinks, which may as well be twenty years …
Sister Kagerô walks past the cell. Her voice stabs, “Cold! Cold! Cold!”
Orito opens her eyes and surveys the ceiling of her five-mat room.
She wonders which rafter the last newest sister used to hang herself.
The fire is dead. The twice-filtered light has a bluish whiteness.
First snow, Orito thinks. The gorge down to Kurozane may be impassable.
With her thumbnail, Orito makes a nick in the wood skirting the wall.
The house may own me, she thinks, but it shan’t own time.
She counts the notches: one day, two days, three days …
… FORTY-SEVEN DAYS, forty-eight days, forty-nine days …
This morning, she calculates, is the fiftieth since her abduction.
You’ll still be here, Fat Rat mocks, after ten thousand notches.
Its eyes are black pearls and it vanishes in a furry blur.
If there was a rat, Orito tells herself, it didn’t speak, because rats don’t. She hears her mother humming in the passageway, as on most mornings. She smells her servant Ayame’s toasted onigiri rice balls rolled in sesame.
“Ayame isn’t here, either,” Orito says. “Stepmother dismissed her.”
These “slippages” of time and senses, she is sure, are caused by the medicine Master Suzaku concocts for each sister before supper. Hers the master calls “solace.” She knows the pleasure it brings is harmful and addictive, but unless she drinks it she shan’t be fed, and what hope has a starving woman of escaping from a mountain shrine in the middle of winter? Better to eat.
Harder to tolerate are thoughts of her stepmother and stepbrother waking up in the Aibagawa residence in Nagasaki. Orito wonders what of her and her father’s belongings remains and what has been sold off: the telescopes, their apparatus, books, and medicines; Mother’s kimonos and jewelry … It is all her stepmother’s property now, to sell to the highest bidder.
Just like she sold me, thinks Orito, feeling anger in her stomach …
… until she hears Yayoi, next door: vomiting; groaning; and vomiting again.
Orito struggles out of bed and puts on her padded over-kimono.
She ties her headscarf over her burn and hurries into the passageway.
I am no longer a daughter, she thinks, but I am still a midwife …
… WHERE WAS I GOING? Orito stands in the musty corridor partitioned from the cloisters by the rows of sliding wooden screens. Daylight enters through a lattice carved along the top. She shivers and she sees her breath, knowing she was going somewhere, but where? Forgetfulness is another trick of Suzaku’s solace. She looks around for clues. The night lamp at the corner by the privy is extinguished. Orito places her palm on the wooden screen, stained dark by countless winters. She pushes, and the screen yields a stubborn inch. Through the gap she sees icicles hanging from the cloisters’ eaves.
An old pine’s branches sag under snow; snow encrusts the seated stones.
A film of ice covers Square Pond. Bare Peak is streaked by veins of snow.
Sister Kiritsubo emerges from behind the pine’s trunk, walking along the cloisters opposite, trailing her withered arm’s fused fingers along the wooden screen. She circumnavigates the courtyard one hundred and eight times daily. Upon reaching the gap, she says, “Sister is up early this morning.”
Orito has nothing to say to Sister Kiritsubo.
Third Sister Umegae approaches up the inner corridor. “This is just the beginning of the Kyôga winter, Newest Sister.” In the snow light, Umegae’s dappled stains are berry purple. “A gift in your womb is like a warm stone in your pocket.”
Orito knows Umegae says this to frighten her. It works.
The stolen midwife hears the noise of vomiting and remembers, Yayoi …
THE SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD woman bends over a wooden bucket. Gastric fluid dangles from her lips, and a slop of fresh vomit is pumped out. Orito breaks the ice on the water bowl with a ladle and carries it to her. Yayoi, glassy-eyed, nods at her visitor to say, The worst is over. Orito wipes Yayoi’s mouth with a square of paper and gives her a cup of the numbingly cold water. “Most of it,” Yayoi says, hiding her fox’s ears with her headband, “went into the bucket this morning, at least.”
“Practice”—Orito wipes the splashes of vomit—“does make perfect, then.”
Yayoi dabs her eyes with her sleeve. “Why am I still sick so often, Sister?”
“The vomiting can sometimes continue right up to the birth.”
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“Last time, I yearned for dango candy; this time, even the thought of it …”
“Each pregnancy is different. Now lie down for a little while.”
Yayoi lies back, puts her hands on her bulge, and withdraws into concern.
Orito reads her thoughts. “You still feel your baby kicking, yes?”
“Yes. My gift”—she pats her belly—“is happy when he hears you … but … but last year Sister Hotaru was vomiting late into her fifth month and then miscarried. The gift had died several weeks before. I was there and the stench was …”
“Sister Hotaru had not, then, felt the child kick for several weeks?”
Yayoi is both reluctant and eager to agree. “I … suppose not.”
“Yet yours is kicking, so what conclusions can you draw?”
Yayoi frowns, allows Orito’s logic to pacify her, and cheers up. “I bless the Goddess for bringing you here.”
Enomoto bought me, Orito thinks, biting her tongue, my stepmother sold me …
She begins rubbing goat fat into Yayoi’s distended belly.
… I curse them both and shall tell them so at the next opportunity.
Here is a kick, below Yayoi’s inverted navel; below the lowest rib, a thump …
… adjacent to the sternum, a kick; over to the left, another stirring.
“There is a chance,” Orito decides to tell Yayoi, “you are carrying twins.”
Yayoi is worldly enough to know the dangers. “How sure are you?”
“Reasonably sure, and it would explain the prolonged vomiting.”
“Sister Hatsune had twins at her second gifting. She climbed two ranks with one labor. If the Goddess blessed me with twins—”
“What can that lump of wood,” Orito snaps, “know about human pain?”
“Please, Sister!” Yayoi begs, afraid. “It’s like insulting your own mother!”
Here come fresh cramps in Orito’s intestines; here is the breathlessness.
“You see, Sister? She can hear. Say you’re sorry, Sister, and she’ll stop it.”
The more solace my body absorbs, Orito knows, the more it needs.
SHE TAKES YAYOI’S foul-smelling pail around the cloisters to the slop barrow.